These Are The Insane Salaries Top Tech Companies Pay Recent Grads and Interns

It’s no secret that Silicon Valley is flush with money. After all, the tech industry’s most visible leaders -- like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla/Space X founder Elon Musk and Microsoft founder Bill Gates -- are known for being visionaries, but also for amassing wealth through their sprawling business empires.

So how does the cash trickle down to the lowliest employees of the world’s biggest tech firms? According to an exhaustive survey compiled by Purdue University Student Jesse Collins, interns at Facebook, Snapchat, Uber and Pinterest are doing quite well -- or even excessively well -- depending upon your standards.

Collins, who compiled the data by querying 600 interns and entry-level employees about job offers they received for positions starting in 2017, posted the results to Twitter on Friday, laying bare a grim statistic for many recent grads who are probably just barely scraping by:

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Collins told CNBC that among the 600 tech employees he contacted, 298 new graduates responded, while 290 interns followed up. As you can see, recent grads land tech roles with a base salary of six figures, and often with exorbitant bonus packages. Amazon pays new hires $103,000 a year, with an additional $16,2000 in company stock, coupled with an annual bonus yielding between $26,000--52,000. If that doesn’t sound too shabby, compare that with Snapchat employees, who got offered an average salary of $120,000 with an additional $80,000 in company stock, paired with a possible $20,000 bonus, according to the survey.

Tech Crunch notes that many of the leading tech companies, such as Facebook and Google, hire recent grads with PhDs and highly specialized skills, and also offer internships to graduate students.

For his part, Collins, who also listed his data in a Google spreadsheet, said he conducted the survey in order to increase transparency about salary negotiation in the tech world. If you ask us, it looks like he’s done a tremendous job.

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Sam Blum is a News Staff Writer for Thrillist. He's also a martial arts and music nerd who appreciates a fine sandwich and cute dogs. Find his clips in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The A.V. Club and Vice. He's on Twitter @Blumnessmonster.